Chateaubriand classed Rabelais with Dante, Homer and Shakespeare as a genius who gave suck to all the others. Flaubert placed him beside Homer, Michelangelo and Goethe. Rabelais was read by Francis Bacon, Molière, Diderot, Balzac and dozens of other giants.
We expect to find a taste for him in Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne and James Joyce; but he was enjoyed too by men such as Charles Kingsley, the author of The Water Babies. He found his way amongst the Lake Poets, especially in Southey’s delightfully rambling miscellany The Doctor, &c, in which figure two Lakeland physicians, father and son. Southey’s elder Dr Daniel picked up the odd volume of his English Rabelais in Kendal. (They were shelved with his Pilgrim’s Progress and Plutarch’s Morals.) ‘The elder Dr Daniel could make nothing of this book,’ Southey tells us, and the younger Dr Daniel, who was about ten years old when he began to read it, understood of it ‘less than he could of the Pilgrim’s Progress. But he made out something.’ That younger Dr Daniel ‘was by nature a Pantagruelist’. Southey comments that true Pantagruelists are rare. ‘Greece produced three great tragic poets, and only one Aristophanes. The French have but one Rabelais.’ He held that ‘all the greatest poets had a spice of Pantagruelism in their composition’, seeing it as ‘essential to their greatness’. Homer was a Pantagruelist, especially in his lost mock-heroic poem Margites. ‘Shakespeare was a Pantagruelist; so was Cervantes.’ And Southey concludes: ‘until the world has produced two other men in whom that humour has been wanting equal to these, I hold my point established’.1
From the start the clergy appreciated Rabelais. His patrons included liberal princes of the Church with Lutheran leanings. (For many Luther meant freedom, joy and laughter.) Centuries later, Trollope’s Archdeacon Grantly kept his Rabelais locked away in his book-room (safe, he fondly thought, from the eyes of his wife).
Grantly enjoyed him for his witty mischief; others liked his merry pranks. So did succeeding generations from the earliest times, but they often enjoyed him for much more. French revolutionaries tended to think of him as one of theirs. Nineteenth-century free-thinkers were sure he was one of them. (Those who do not like him and dismiss him as sordid include Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet Commissar in The Cancer Ward.) His laughing philosophy appeals to the humanity of so many in so many lands. Like Erasmus, Rabelais is a deeply Christian author who is read and enjoyed by readers who do not share his faith and who do not even always recognize it in his writings. His satire of superstition and hypocrisy is priceless. His thought welcomes and embraces the wisdom of the ancient world and the kinds of laughter which lead us to look afresh at the world around us.
Yet when readers come to him for the first time they are often puzzled. What are they to make of these astonishing books with their extraordinary and fantastical narratives which often push back the frontiers of decency, with their long lists of words and names, their arresting prologues which make the books read like plays and their ability to give to print the allusion of speech at many levels of the social scale? The answer to that question is that the works of Rabelais really are sui generis: there is nothing else like them. When Guillaume Budé (the great scholar whom Rabelais admired) needed to define the Greek word planos (a kind of wandering trickster such as the Panurge of Pantagruel), he simply gestured towards François Villon: ‘His name alone is as good as a definition.’ For Rabelaisian too we might do the same, and point towards Rabelais. He is his own definition. But we can be helped for example by knowing something of Shakespeare. Rabelais and Shakespeare have much in common: they intertwine tears and laughter, comedy and tragedy. Their ghosts walk and their witches cast spells; their peasants are funny; topsy-turvy standards reign during Twelfth Night and Carnival, when reprobates and rogues are sources of fun not indignation, when London youths or Parisian students play outrageous tricks on the pillars of the establishment and their prudish ladies.
The lack of moral censure of the lecherous companions in Pantagruel (in, that is, the first of our books by Rabelais) worries some readers. They might meditate on Charles Lamb’s defence of Congreve and Wycherly, the seventeenth-century playwrights, against the dulling influences of bourgeois drama: ‘We dread infection from the scenic representation of disorder, and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety that our morality should not take cold, we wrap it up in a great blanket surtout of precaution against the breeze and the sunshine.’ Lamb is ‘glad for a season to take an airing beyond strict conscience’. He loves, ‘for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions’. He then comes back to his cage and to restraint ‘the fresher and more healthy for it’. He is ‘the gayer, at least, for it’. Those fictional immoralities and freedoms ‘are a world of themselves almost as much as fairy land’.2 Southey’s younger Dr Daniel took especial delight in the bottom-wiping chapter of Gargantua when he read it as a boy. C. S. Lewis, a sound guide in matters of the bawdy, maintains that it is the Christian theology underpinning Rabelais which best explains the pleasure taken in that chapter. Human beings, unlike other animals, are not at ease with their condition, which they find comic (or in the case, say, of dead bodies, eerie). Something seems to have gone wrong with us. We are the only animals who find our sexuality laughable. Dogs and horses do not. So too for all the natural functions of the body, many of which we consistently hide. Most other creatures do not. So too death (which is often comic in Rabelais). Human beings veil their physical functions, so comedy tugs the veil cheekily aside.
It might be expected that graver sages would dislike Rabelais, but it is not so. Even the sober Dean Inge of Saint Paul’s found ‘the ribaldry of Aristophanes and Rabelais comparatively harmless’. It was part of his world as a scholar whose intellectual sphere embraced the normative laughter of the ancient world. But Rabelais was no more content than Molière to limit his comedy to ribaldry and slapstick. Molière needed his philosophical Misanthrope, Rabelais, his Third Book; Molière, his daring Dom Juan with its challenging of misused rank and power, Rabelais, the riches of his Fourth Book.
To enjoy Rabelais and Shakespeare is to delight in words. Both of them kindle our delight in language. (The volumes which Rabelais himself certainly saw through the press contain nothing but words: he had no need of woodcuts or illustrations.) Both delight in speech in all its diversity. Both enjoy complex word-play; both use puns seriously and in fun. Rabelais is far more erudite, but Shakespeare ranges more widely. Unlike Shakespeare, however, Rabelais, the erstwhile friar and monk, is simply not concerned to create realistic female characters. Both are at home, though, with popular farces and their often harsh conventions: Rabelais expounds some of his deepest thoughts in chapters presented as farces. The objects of our laughter in a farce on the stage (as in a cartoon on television or in a chapter of Rabelais or a scene in Shakespeare) are getting their comic deserts, often in terms of what would be extreme cruelty if the laughter were drained away and the cruelty taken to be real). But when all is said and done, Rabelais, who changes his comic norms from book to book, must be left to speak for himself (with a measure of help, at times, from his editors).3
RABELAIS THE MAN: WINE AND SCHOLARSHIP
Rabelais studied deeply and travelled far, yet he never cut himself off from his own pays. He was profoundly learned in an age which respected erudition, yet he never lost the common touch. He seems to have had a happy childhood in a well-off family in Touraine. The family home was La Deviniére near Chinon. He rejoices in the local wine; delights in the local place-names; revels in the peasants, friends and patrons he knew in Touraine. As children we live our lives amidst giants who may seem powerful but erratic and silly. For Rabelais reminiscences of childhood evoke happy memories of them: his great war in Gargantua is fought over the castle, fields, streams and ford which lie around the family home. Throughout his books, fantasy intertwines with the real, the personal, the local, the private.
He remained in touch with popular culture (culture, that is, which, at all levels of society, expressed itself in French not Latin). Yet he co
uld never be a ‘popular’ author appealing to the uneducated masses. He wrote with the art and erudition of a Renaissance scholar. He makes great demands on his readers. Already in his lifetime those demands were accepted: copies of his books quickly made their way into the libraries of kings, convents and cathedrals as well as into more modest book-rooms.
Rabelais is the high-priest of wine happily drunk in good company. Wine in his writings is not usually a symbol of something else, though it can be. For Rabelais (as for David, whose psalms Rabelais had chanted, day in day out, in his convent chapel) ‘wine maketh glad the heart of man’. There is a Dionysiac savour about many of his best pages. It is as a famous physician that he linked good wine with the laughter he aroused to make the sufferings of his patients more bearable. He held with the ancients that wine can delight and inspire. As a physician he was sure that (in moderation) it does us good. It can be drunk with delight as a means of quite literally raising our spirits. In his Fourth Book, published not long before he died, he presents wine – symbolized by the figure of the Wingéd Bacchus at Amyclae – as a God-given means of lightening our bodies and lifting our minds up towards things spiritual.
By then his knock-about giant has changed into a Renaissance Socrates, open to divine promptings. By then readers have discovered that the mechanics of sex, crapulence and gluttony are amusing as part of a wider vision of what men and women are, or may become.
Some delicious country foods were highly perishable: most entrails especially had to be eaten soon after the slaughter. In mid-winter a great many animals had to be culled so as to leave enough fodder for the ones to be kept. So country folk enjoyed mid-winter feasts of tripe as the February cull met the wine of the last autumn’s vendange. Rabelais delights in those cherished intervals of merriment brought round by the rolling year with its Twelfth Night indulgences and Shrovetide revels. Even the lofty Pantagruel of the Fourth Book takes grateful pleasure in rare stately banquets. He presides over a companionable feast celebrating a longed-for change in the weather. Only the idle belly-worshippers treat their whole lives as though there were nothing else in the world but Twelfth Night feasts and carni-valesque debaucheries. And they are trounced for it in the Fourth Book.
RABELAIS THE MAN: MEDICINE, LAW AND OTHER STUDIES
From the outset medical men liked Rabelais. The earliest extant allusion to Pantagruel in print is found in a lecture delivered before the medical faculty at Nantes on 7 August 1534. The lecturer, an Italian physician, contrasts the modest contents of a proper enema with the enormous compound prescribed by a rival, more worthy, he thinks, of the giants in those recent books of Pantagruel enjoying such a success.
That Rabelais was a physician everyone knows. That he was a student of the law is less known. Law was his first love. He counted amongst his earliest friends in Touraine André Tiraqueau, a great legal scholar. Legal men and women may still feel a certain complicity with Rabelais. He can think like a lawyer: his Third Book was constructed by a man who knew his Roman Law inside out (and its glossators too). He can still arouse laughter even in his most legal mode. But not always: few readers today can laugh their lonely way unaided through the chapters on Mr Justice Bridoye in the Third Book. Yet, with a little help and effort, smiles, laughter and sudden guffaws can again break through.
As a young man Rabelais joined the Observantines (the stricter branch of the Franciscans). He read theology. He was ordained a priest. He must have studied Bonaventura, the glory of his Order. At the same time he developed a solid acquaintance amongst distinguished Touraine ‘humanists’ (scholars who gave pride of place to the ‘more humane’ writings of Greece and Rome). For humanists everywhere elegant Latin stretched from before Cicero and Seneca right up to Jerome in the fourth century (and even, exceptionally, to Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth). As for the study of Greek, it included almost everything written in that fluent tongue: Plato of course; Aristotle too, but also Aristophanes and Lucian amongst the laughers, the medical authorities Hippocrates and Galen, Plutarch the moralist, the New Testament and all the Greek theologians (including many disliked by Rome). Several humanists aspired to learn Hebrew, often very successfully. (Rabelais knew at least something of that tongue.)
Rabelais was hounded by his Franciscan superiors who disapproved of his studying Greek. (Greek encouraged dangerous thoughts.) He shared that ordeal with his learned friend Pierre Amy. In his Third Book Rabelais recalls how Pierre Amy had consulted Homeric and Virgilian ‘lots’ (which involved opening pages of Homer and Virgil and seeking guidance from selected lines of verse). He was led to renounce his vows and flee. Rabelais, however, had behaved more prudently: great folk intervened for him and he was transferred quite legally to the Benedictines.
Already, as a Franciscan, Rabelais was corresponding with Guillaume Budé, the leading French student of Greek and a towering legal authority. He found a generous patron in his local bishop, Geoffroy d’Estissac, who supported him even when he had abandoned his new Order to become a physician. After living in Paris (irregularly for a professed monk), he quickly graduated in medicine at Montpellier.
He retained mixed memories of his short Benedictine phase. In many ways he remained a Franciscan rather than a monk. (Franciscans are mendicants not monks.) Nevertheless his Frère Jean, one of the greatest comic characters of all time, is a Benedictine, often simply called ‘The Monk’.
The break Rabelais made with the religious life was final. His two surviving children, François and Junie, were eventually legitimated (1540) by the Vatican bureaucracy. They bore the surname of Rabelais. He also fathered a son called Théodule, ‘Slave of God’. The child was dandled on the knees of cardinals. He died in infancy. Rabelais, working as a physician with few outward signs of his religious vocation, was in Church law an apostate, a traitor to his vows. That was ingeniously put right. His champion in such matters was his patron Jean Du Bellay, the Bishop of Paris, who, despite (or because of) his Lutheran sympathies, was made a cardinal in 1535. Rabelais wrote and submitted to the Vatican a Supplication for his Apostasy: thanks to Jean Du Bellay, who knew how to thread skilfully through the labyrinthine ways of the Vatican bureaucracy, he duly ended up a secular priest (1536), living in the world and permitted to practise his ‘art’ (his medicine), though, as a man in holy Orders, forbidden to shed blood whilst doing so.
From 1536 he was ‘Dr’ Rabelais or ‘Father’ Rabelais, widely known and respected for his knowledge of medicine and law.
RABELAIS AND HIS PATRONS
Rabelais had several patrons, clerical and lay. All were liberal thinkers. Some at least had Lutheran sympathies. Even before Pantagruel and Gargantua he was supported by powerful protectors. Geoffroy d’Estissac helped him from the early days. Then he was favoured by Jean Du Bellay and his brother, the statesman Guillaume Du Bellay, the Seigneur de Langey. Rabelais served them both in turn as their private physician. He accompanied each of them to Italy more than once. He was with Langey on 9 January 1543 when he died near Roanne on his way home from the Piedmont. Langey was his hero, praised as such in the Third and Fourth Books. Dr Rabelais was with Jean Du Bellay (now Bishop of Le Mans) when he completed his Fourth Book of 1552.
He stood at the height of his reputation in the 1540s and early 1550s. He was encouraged and protected by his kings (not always effectively: French kings were not in all things above the law). Both François I and Henri II gave him fulsome privilèges (legally enforceable rights as an author). Quite exceptionally they covered not only books published or ready to be so, but books yet to be written. Over his Fourth Book of 1552 Rabelais was positively courted by Cardinal Odet de Châtillon. That cardinal was a member of a powerful trio, nephews of the great statesman Anne de Montmorency, the Constable of France. Two were openly won over to the Reformation: François d’Andelot and Gaspar de Coligny, the Admiral of France. Some ten years after the death of Rabelais, the Cardinal Odet de Châtillon too dramatically showed his colours. He fled to England and became an Anglican. From th
ere he issued – on what authority? – letters of marque, licences (such as Elizabeth I granted to Francis Drake) permitting corsairs legally to harry enemy shipping. Odet de Châtillon lies buried with honour in Canterbury Cathedral.
In 1546 Rabelais was graciously permitted to dedicate his Third Book to Marguerite d’Angoulême, the Queen of Navarre, the liberal, mystical, platonizing, evangelical sister of François I. (An author in her own right, she was a protector of evangelicals, even of some disapproved of by her royal brother.)
Earlier, on 30 December 1532, while physician in the Hôtel-Dieu, the great hospital in Lyons, Rabelais seized an opportunity to write to Erasmus. It was a matter of sending to him a manuscript of Josephus on behalf of Georges d’Armagnac, the princely Bishop of Rhodez. Rabelais was at pains to demonstrate his grasp of Greek, the key to so much wisdom and knowledge. In his carefully calligraphed letter he hails Erasmus not only as his spiritual father but as his mother too, a mother to whose nurture he owed more than he could ever repay. Rabelais had then published little: it was not as a fellow author that he wrote to Erasmus but as an admirer of a sage who had changed his life. Erasmus had already influenced him as a man and was soon to influence him just as deeply in his writings. As an author his debt to Erasmus was to become immense. Erasmus showed that worthwhile things could be achieved outside the cloister. He showed how Christianity could be further enriched by the writings of the ancients. He knew how to laugh and he held medicine in high esteem. Rabelais became the kind of humanist doctor who risked his life for his patients during the plague: the kind of physician whom Erasmus could admire.
Gargantua and Pantagruel Page 2